The Zhentarim Gambit

Session 4 - The Gibbering Returns

The Musings of Mindartis

5

OCT/15

The good news is that I know whose scabbard I have now. The bad news is that he has been dead for hundreds of years, the location of his grave is lost (possibly forever), and it seems like the abyssal enemy he fought is coming back.

After we parted ways with Taragon we marched west to join the liberation effort at the human city of Waterdeep. A few days into our trip we stumbled upon an old Antarian ruin that we decided to poke about in for a little. The ruin appeared to be an old fort or outpost that had crumbled long ago, possibly even before the fall of that ancient empire. Vines and shrubbery had completely overtaken the age-old stonework of the buildings and walls, but in the center of the compound was a man carved from stone.

To call him a statue would belittle the reverence with which he was sculpted. No detail was too small for the artist to embrace, including the strangely ornate scabbard at this hero’s hip. I was drawn to the effigy, pulled to it by an ancient curiosity coursing through my being.

Unfortunately, my inspection was cut short by a scream from some dwarfish voice in one of the buildings. Soon another scream followed and out poured an undulating mass of body parts from all manner of races. The ground around the aberration started to pulse and swell.

After a brief, and briefly terrifying, battle we beat back the mass, though not without loss. Krogg, in all of his finite wisdom, decided to deal the finishing blow by toppling the statue over our enemy before I could fully look it over. I began to dig through the pile looking for an inscription, which Kardos apparently didn’t think was the appropriate reaction considering what we just faced. He explained that the thing we defeated was actually something called the “Gibbering Horde” which was some kind of ancient evil that brought down Antariel. The Horde has not been seen since the Antarian mages called forth the Wonderwall, destroying the Horde and their capital city in the process.

I admit, this sounded really bad but there was still a compulsion inside me to find out everything I could about the statue before we left that place. I finally uncovered a few fragmented bits of text that Krogg had not destroyed and showed them to Kardos. He read them over and frowned, still concerned about why the Gibbering Horde had resurfaced in our world.

I finally caved and told the rest of the party about the night a month ago when I had my run in with the spirit. I even showed him the scabbard she left for me. Kardos read that too, and it finally seemed to focus him enough to give me some translations. He said that both the inscription from the statue and my scabbard were written in Old Antarian.

According to Kardos the bits I managed to pull from the rubble described a man named Roland, the word for either “reflection” or “mirror”, “memorial”, and “Battle of Windward Pass”. He said that it might have also said something about Roland’s grave but it was too far cracked to make out. My scabbard, however, read as clear as the day that it was made:To tear the horde asunder, a mirror, nothing more – Of Roland’s Make